Running Saves Life Of Olympian Lynn Jennings

Her embolism would have killed a less remarkably fit athlete.

Lynn Jennings won three world cross country championships and earned the first Olympic distance running medal on the track by an American woman, a 10,000-meter bronze in Barcelona in 1992. She was a national high school indoor track record holder and won USA Cross Country crowns nine times.

Larson, who knew Jennings from time they spent together at adult running camps in Craftsbury, Vermont, had learned that in January, Jennings “had almost died. But she didn’t. She is alive today due to a toughness developed in competition and a physiology built by a lifetime of running.”

Jenning’s own words take up the rest of the blog. Still competitive as a rower, she runs for fitness on the trails of Forest Park in Portland, Oregon. But on January 10, she wrote, she had to stop after 100 meters because “I was so breathless that I had to put my hands on my knees and walk.”

She suspected anemia and planned to have blood work done, but four days later, on a walk with her dog, “I was suddenly unable to breathe. I was blacking out," she wrote. "My hands and feet were icy. I was dizzy. I sat down on the sidewalk, in the dark, unable to stand or continue on.” Finally, with the help of a passerby, she was able to get up and managed to return home. A neighbor drove her to a nearby hospital.

Jennings had had an acute bilateral pulmonary embolism, and both of her lungs were filled with clots, some of them large. One lung wasn’t functioning at all, and the other was compromised.

But as Jennings wrote, “I was told in no uncertain terms by cardiologists, pulmonary specialists, internists, radiologists and ER nurses and doctors that the size, strength and power of my lungs and heart are what saved me since my heart was under severe strain and pressure. The lung involvement that I had with a less able set of lungs and a less able heart would have lead to a different outcome.”

Even that push off the sidewalk to get home and arrange the drive to the hospital “exerted enough pressure on my lungs such that some clots might have moved around a bit, buying me more breathing capacity,” Jennings was told by her attending physician. “Short of that happening, she had no explanation why I was still around.”

Plain and simply, Jennings wrote, “being a runner saved my life. The redundancy in my left lung, my strong and powerful heart and my honed tenacity and iron will are what got me home that morning,” and made the trip to the hospital possible.

Jennings, in her heyday, trained 100 miles a week and pursued world and national titles “because running reminded me exactly who I am and what I am made of," she wrote. "These years later it remains purely so.”

But it also was the reason why she was able to sit up in her hospital bed and be a constant source of wonder to doctors who came by to see the Olympian “whose resting and sleeping heart rate hovered between 29 – 38.”

"Some mornings my bed was surrounded by residents, 3rd year medical students and the presiding doctor – all of whom were eager to learn from an aerobic specimen," Jennings wrote. "I, in turn, wanted them to see what running did for me aside from records, medals and national titles - it saved my life.”